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It was a cold, snowy, windy January day in 1909 when a short, slightly built 22-year-old disembarked from the Yakutan in Prince William Sound. Eustace Paul Ziegler arrived in the boom town of Cordova to take charge of the Episcopal mission. Fresh from the Yale School of Fine Arts, he must have been a shock to the thousands of roughly dressed pick-and-shovel "stiffs," lumberjacks, miners, engineers, dynamiters, surveyors, adventurers and what-not who had "floated in with the tides and the ties"...
Alaska's first law officer in the Interior knew a thing or two about the criminal element. Frank Canton, appointed deputy marshal for Circle in winter 1898, had served with distinction as a peace officer in Wyoming and Oklahoma Territory. He'd also escaped from prison while serving time for bank robbery, murder and holding up a stagecoach in Texas. The sketchy lawman's reputation as a range detective in Wyoming, notably as a killer for ambushing rustlers, secured his appointment in Alaska...
Technically speaking, Anchorage was born in November 1920. According to information gleaned by the League of Women Voters many years ago, it was eligible to become a first-class city because it had a population in excess of 400 – provided that two-thirds of the voters were ready to assume responsibilities of city government for its 2,500 residents. A group of interested citizens filed a petition with the U.S. District Court at Valdez, which was the headquarters of the Third Judicial Division. T...
Alaska's governor from 1933 to 1939 believed that more people and more roads would help the territory achieve statehood. And John Weir Troy, who came to Alaska during the gold rush in 1897, thought a larger population and a better road system would help achieve that goal. "More people for Alaska is her greatest need," said the former pack-train worker. "But they won't come, and we could not take care of them if they did, until we have roads to take them to the valleys, hills and mountains where...
Criminals dabbling in everything from prostitution to bootlegging to gambling flourished in the Alaska territory during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Believing that gold miners and other citizens easily could be parted from their hard-earned income, thugs crossed the border into Alaska when law enforcement in the rest of the United States cracked down on their criminal enterprises. A January 1921 newspaper article from Juneau captured the flavor of the situation: "In anticipation of an influx...
Glowing reports, like the following excerpt from the Aug. 8, 1897, edition of the New York World newspaper, helped fuel the stampede for gold along the Yukon River. "Mr. J. O. Hestwod, one of the most successful argonauts of '97, has just returned from Klondike and furnishes by telegraph to the Sunday World a true picture of Alaska as it really is. He said: 'Modern or ancient history records nothing so rich in extent as the recent discoveries of gold on the tributaries of the Yukon River. 'The...
When the U. S. Army took over responsibility for administering Alaska in 1867, law enforcement found it had its hands full trying to stem the flow of liquor into the territory. Up until alcohol possession was legalized in 1899, smugglers brought their illegal brew into Alaska via whalers, fishing vessels, American and foreign ships and Indian canoes from both British Columbia and U.S. ports. Enforcement also had problems controlling the manufacture of "hootch," a name taken from the Tlingit...
The remote islands of the Aleutian Chain, home to the Unangan people for more than 8,000 years, endured the first invasion on American soil since the War of 1812. On June 6, 1942, at around 10:30 p.m., 500 Japanese troops came ashore at Kiska. They captured a small American naval weather detachment of 10 men, along with a dog. One member of the detachment escaped, but surrendered after 50 days – thin, starving and cold. The enemy then invaded Attu at 3 a.m. on June 7. Villagers, who'd been e...
The establishment of airplane competition didn't stop Chester Noongwook of St. Lawrence Island from continuing his dog sled mail service run until 1963. His was the last mail delivery of its kind in the country. Wien Airlines established the first commercial airplane base on St. Lawrence Island at Gambell and built a landing strip at Savoonga. The company took over the mail-carrying duties for the U.S. Post Office. But Noongwook was retrained on a supplemental basis whenever the planes couldn't...
Movies about Alaska, mostly based on books by Jack London and Rex Beach, thrilled audiences during the early 1900s. But all motion pictures were filmed outside of Alaska. So when a group of Oregon promoters planning a travelogue and feature film about the territory toured Alaska's towns in 1922, several Anchorage residents decided to go into the filmmaking business themselves. They formed the Alaska Motion Picture Corp. and elected Austin E. "Cap" Lathrop, who owned theaters in Anchorage,...
By the early 1950s, the tent city at the mouth of Ship Creek had turned into a bustling, modern city. Clifford Cernick wrote that Anchorage was much like Baghdad in an article that appeared in the Seattle Times on March 4, 1951 – a time when Baghdad was a bustling city, a jewel in the desert. "A grizzled prospector, back in Anchorage after three years in the Alaskan wilderness, noted the towering framework of a new apartment building, the paved streets, the bustling downtown traffic and g...
In the early 1900s, coal was being shipped from as far away as Cardiff, Wales, to the U.S. Navy's coal station at Sitka. Some thought that the coal deposits at Chickaloon in the Matanuska Valley might meet the Navy's requirements. Along with federal Bureau of Mines director A.M. Holmes, Jack Dalton went to look the mine over in 1913. When Holmes concluded the coal would suffice, he gave Dalton the task of figuring out a way to get the coal from the mine to tidewater – at a cost the Bureau c...
More than 60 years ago, the framers of Alaska's Constitution found one of their most difficult problems to be the intermediate government between municipalities and the state. Their solution was the creation of a unit known as the "borough." "It's a county with a New York name," a legislator once said. Most delegates to the Constitutional Convention did not want to slice the territory into a large number of counties as in other states. Valdez delegate William A. "Bill" Egan listed "make-up of...
During the Klondike Gold Rush, Dawson's dancehall girls offered prospectors a welcome diversion from their grueling, lonely days of digging in the sub-arctic tundra. "The sourdoughs lay on their bunks until noon – and noon might just as well be any other time – moving painfully about only to stoke the stove or break off a chunk of rye bread, more from sheer boredom than hunger," wrote Ellis Lucia about digging for gold during a winter in the north country in "Klondike Kate: The Life of the Que...
Americans have been casting ballots on the first Tuesday in November since the mid-1840s. Why November and why Tuesdays? The answer goes back to our founding fathers when agriculture was prominent. Congress used to meet in December and adjourn in March every year because that's when farmers could get away from their land. A 1792 law established that elections should be held some time in November to give time to count the votes before the new congressional session started. Americans also began of...
One hundred and fifty-two years ago, a ceremony held in Sitka transferred Alaska from Russia to the United States. The agreed-upon purchase price of $7.2 million had been paid earlier in the year. It didn't take long after the American flag replaced the Russian flag on Oct. 18 for conspiracy theorists to start speculating that America had not paid that full amount for what some called "Seward's Icebox." Many people thought that the United States government was involved in a cover-up that...
A "floating court" of sorts evolved when justice was meted out from the decks of revenue cutters beginning in the late 1880s. And a commander in the U.S. Revenue Marine, precursor to the U.S. Coast Guard, was the first revenue cutter commander to make regular patrols into the harsh Arctic waters. Captain Michael A. Healy was about the only source of law in a lawless land, and he transported criminals onboard the cutter Bear from remote Alaska communities to Sitka for trial. Healy began his...
Three men found a large deposit of nuggets on Aug. 17, 1896, which started the famed Klondike Gold Rush. George Washington Carmack, who came north in 1885, James Mason, better known as Skookum Jim, and his nephew, Charlie – often called Dawson or Tagish Charlie – left Fortymile during that summer to go fishing. The Natives and Carmack found what they thought might be a good fishing spot and set their nets. They hauled in a few king salmon, but the fishing was poor so they gave up and cut tim...
The U.S. Army Service's famed "Black Wolf Squadron" planted its mark on Alaska history in 1920, when four biplanes flew across our northern skies in an attempt to prove the feasibility of long-distance air travel. The New York-to-Nome Alaskan Flying Expedition, as it was known, was comprised of a squad of four airmen with crewmembers flying wheeled DH-4 De Havilland biplanes. The crew left Fort Mitchell in New York bound for Fort Davis in Nome on July 15, to demonstrate that the United States co...
Seventy-seven years ago this month Japanese Zeros bombed Dutch Harbor and then occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. Why? Because they thought that two months earlier James "Jimmy" Doolittle had led the U.S. Army Air Forces in the first-ever bombing raid on Japan from an airstrip in the Aleutian Chain and wanted to prevent further attacks on their homeland. The Japanese bombers probably were surprised when they did not find any military air bases in the Aleutians. Turns out Doolittle...
After Alaska became part of the United States in 1867, the U.S. military ruled America's newest possession for about 17 years. Then on July 4, 1884, U.S. President Chester A. Arthur appointed Republican John Henry Kinkead of Nevada as the District of Alaska's first governor. And Kinkead has the distinction of serving as the district's governor for the shortest amount of time – less than a year – as he resigned in May 1885. Kinkead, who served as Nevada's governor from 1879 to 1883, knew qui...
Klondike Mike Mahoney's return trip to Dawson in 1898 included a hike up the Chilkoot Trail with an unusual item strapped to his back: a piano. It all started when Mahoney hopped aboard the City of Seattle and found it stuffed to the bulwark with passengers, freight and a variety of animals, including more than 100 dogs headed to Skagway on consignment and horses crowed into stalls in the dining room. Mahoney shared his stateroom with a strange little man named Hal Henry, booking agent and manag...
In July 1869, the steamer Active arrived in Sitka with former Secretary of State William H. Seward and his entourage on board. He had negotiated the purchase of Alaska from the Russians for a mere $7.2 million in March 1867 and now wanted to see the magnificent land for himself. U.S. Gen. Davis held events in his honor, and then Seward traveled to Lynn Canal where villagers at Klukwan gave him the honor of calling him "The Great Tyee" (chief). Seward was impressed with the ceremonial art he saw...
Between 1912 and 1915, a number of single, unattached men mysteriously disappeared in Southeast Alaska. The few law enforcement officials in the territory were baffled, but a suspect finally emerged in the fall of 1915. A Petersburg man named Edward Krause, who'd run for the Territorial Legislature as a Socialist Party candidate in 1912, represented himself as a U.S. Marshall to officials at the Treadwell Mine in Douglas in mid-September. Krause told the bosses that he had a court summons for...
One man who arrived in Southeast Alaska's new gold-rush settlement of Harrisburg, later named Juneau, in 1880 created a sensation by claiming he had seen a city appear above a glacier. But people who knew him said, "He was the kind of person to gaze into a raincloud and see the sun." Richard "Dick" Willoughby landed in Harrisburg from Missouri shortly after Auk chief Kowee led Joe Juneau and Richard Harris to Silver Bow Basin, which started Alaska's first big gold rush. Many historians claim the...
